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The state-of-the-art of research on science research careers
Abstract
This handbook chapter summarises research on research careers from a meta-research perspective.
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This article focuses on key features of the use of sex and gender in titles of articles about women, science, and engineering over an important forty-six-year period (1965–2010). The focus is theoretically and empirically consequential. Theoretically, the paper addresses science as a critical case that connects femininity/masculinity to social stratification; and the use of sex and gender as an enduring, analytical issue that reveals perspectives on hierarchies of femininity/masculinity. Empirically, this article identifies the emergence, development, and stabilization of published articles about women, science, and engineering that use sex and gender in their titles. The distinctive method involves search, retrieval, and review of 23,430 articles, using intercoder reliabilities for inclusion/exclusion. This results in a uniquely specified and comprehensive set of articles on our subject and the identification of titles with sex and gender. Findings point to (1) the growth of gender titles, (2) their increase in every field, (3) differing concentrations of sex and gender titles in journals, (4) a span of telling topic areas, and (5) higher citation rates of gender, compared to sex, titles. Broader implications appear in reasons for the growth of gender titles, meanings of topic areas that occur, insights into social inequalities and science policies, and emerging complexities of nonbinary categories of sex/gender.
Across academia, men and women tend to publish at unequal rates. Existing explanations include the potentially unequal impact of parenthood on scholarship, but a lack of appropriate data has prevented its clear assessment. Here, we quantify the impact of parenthood on scholarship using an extensive survey of the timing of parenthood events, longitudinal publication data, and perceptions of research expectations among 3064 tenure-track faculty at 450 Ph.D.-granting computer science, history, and business departments across the United States and Canada, along with data on institution-specific parental leave policies. Parenthood explains most of the gender productivity gap by lowering the average short-term productivity of mothers, even as parents tend to be slightly more productive on average than nonparents. However, the size of productivity penalty for mothers appears to have shrunk over time. Women report that paid parental leave and adequate childcare are important factors in their recruitment and retention. These results have broad implications for efforts to improve the inclusiveness of scholarship.
The importance of participation in academic conferences is well known for members of the scientific community. It is not only for the feedback and the improvement of the work, it is also about career development, building networks and increasing visibility. Nevertheless, women continue to be under-represented in these academic events and even more so in the most visible positions such as speaking roles. This paper presents the development of a tool based on performance indicators, which will allow monitoring and evaluating gender roles and inequalities in academic conferences in order to tackle the underrepresentation of women. The study identifies relevant perspectives (participation, organizational structure and attitudes) and designs specific lists of performance indicators for each of them. The tool is based on a combination of two multicriteria techniques, Analytic Hierarchy Process and Analytic Hierarchy Process Sort, and a qualitative analysis based on in-depth interviews and information gathered from a focus group. The use of the AHP multi-criteria decision technique has allowed us to weight the indicators according to the opinion of several experts, and with them to be able to generate from these weightings composite indicators for each of the three dimensions. The most relevant indicators were for the participation dimension. Additionally, the tool developed has been applied to an academic conference which has been monitored in real time. The results are shown as a traffic light visualization approach, where red means bad performance, yellow average performance and green good performance, helping us to present the results for each indicator. Finally, proposals for improvement actions addressed to the red indicators are explained. The work carried out highlights the need to broaden the study of gender equality in academic conferences, not only regarding the participation but also the performance of different roles and functions.
There is extensive evidence of gender inequality in research leading to insufficient representation of women in leadership positions. Numbers revealing a gender gap in research are periodically reported by national and international institutions but data on perceptions of gender equality within the research community are scarce. In the present study, a questionnaire based on the British Athena Survey of Science, Engineering and Technology (ASSET 2016) was distributed among researchers working in Spain. Consistent with the original UK-based study, women in research perceived a greater degree of gender inequality than men. This difference was consistent from junior to senior positions, within public and private universities as well as research centres, and across all research disciplines. When responses were compared with the existing UK-based questionnaire, researchers in Spain felt that women and men are treated more equally in the workplace, yet they perceived their home departments to be less supportive regarding matters of gender equality. The results of this study provide clear evidence that men and women do not share the same perceptions of gender equality in science and that their differing perceptions are relatively consistent across two major European countries. The fact that men occupy the majority of senior positions while not perceiving the same inequality as women do, may be critical when it comes to ensuring the fair ascent of women to senior positions in an academic system. These data encourage the implementation of measures to ensure that both men and women are aware of gender biases in research.
We analyzed 2898 scientific papers published between 1995 and 2017 in which two or more authors shared the first author position. For papers in which the first and second authors made equal contributions, mixed-gender combinations were most frequent, followed by male-male and then female-female author combinations. For mixed-gender combinations, more male authors were in the first position, although the disparity decreased over time. For papers in which three or more authors made equal contributions, there were more male authors than female authors in the first position and more all-male than all-female author combinations. The gender inequalities observed among authors who made equal contributions are not consistent with random or alphabetical ordering of authors. These results raise concerns about female authors not receiving proper credit for publications and suggest a need for journals to request clarity on the method used to decide author order among those who contributed equally.
In this article, we address one of the recurrent problems of career theory, namely the integration of individual agency and structural conditions of action in explanations of career decisions, and through them, career trajectories and their outcomes. We draw on Barley’s suggestion to include scripts as mediating between institutions and individual actions. By theoretically specifying scripts as collectively shared interpretive schemes that describe successful careers, we are able to introduce them as a specific factor that contributes to the explanation of career decisions. We demonstrate with a study of German early career researchers in two fields how scripts can be empirically identified and used in combination with other explanatory factors. Our analysis demonstrates how the concept ‘career script’ captures a specific social influence on career decisions that is different from rules governing behaviour and individual interests, goals and plans for a career.
Scientific communities expect early career researchers (ECRs) to become intellectually independent and to develop longer-term research plans (individual research programs [IRPs]). How such programs emerge during the early career phase is still poorly understood. Drawing on semistructured interviews with German ECRs in plant biology, experimental physics, and early modern history, we show that the development of such a plan is a research process in itself. The processes leading to IRPs are conditioned by the fields’ epistemic practices for producing new knowledge. By linking the conditions under which ECRs work to the epistemic properties of their IRPs, we identify mechanisms that produce these programs and conditions facilitating or hindering the operation of these mechanisms.
This article examines how boundary-crossing careers influence creative knowledge combination by looking at a group of creative artists whose careers straddle professional arts and academia. Whereas previous research has treated individuals as vehicles for knowledge transmission across intertwined networks, this study emphasizes their active role as knowledge brokers. It examines how work role transitions trigger a dynamic interplay between actors and contexts, and brings about changes in the cognitive frames of individuals and their propensity to connect knowledge across contexts. The study employs Bhabha’s concept of the ‘third space of hybridity’ to denote the agency space where career actors construct hybrid role identities and engage in knowledge brokering. The analysis identifies two categories of hybrid with different boundary-crossing careers and shows how work role transitions influence the topology of the third space where knowledge brokering occurs. The ‘artist-academics’ whose careers span art and academia concurrently experience recurrent micro-role transitions. They are ‘organic’ hybrids operating at the ‘overlapping space’ where knowledge translation and integration occur naturally in everyday work. They are ‘embedded’ knowledge brokers. The ‘artists-in-academia’, who cross over from the art world to academia, experience more permanent macro-role transitions. They are ‘intentional hybrids’ who make conscious efforts to bridge two discrete work domains by creating a separate ‘transitional space’. Their knowledge brokering activities are instrumental in transforming both their own knowledge and that of their work context: they are transformative knowledge brokers. The study advances our understanding of career mobility as a mechanism that facilitates creative knowledge combination by highlighting actor agency and the underlying cognitive-behavioural mechanisms.
It is often argued that female researchers publish on average less than male researchers do, but male and female authored papers have an equal impact. In this paper we try to better understand this phenomenon by (i) comparing the share of male and female researchers within different productivity classes, and (ii) by comparing productivity whereas controlling for a series of relevant covariates. The study is based on a disambiguated Swedish author dataset, consisting of 47,000 researchers and their WoS-publications during the period of 2008-2011 with citations until 2015. As the analysis shows, in order to have impact quantity does make a difference for male and female researchers alike—but women are vastly underrepresented in the group of most productive researchers. We discuss and test several possible explanations of this finding, using a data on personal characteristics from several Swedish universities. Gender differences in age, authorship position, and academic rank do explain quite a part of the productivity differences.
The original scientific and technical human capital (STHC) model (Bozeman et al. in Int J Technol Manag 22(7/8):716–740, 2001) has been applied in many different research policy studies over the past decade, yielding multiple applications for evaluating the capacity and career development of engineers and scientists. Despite increased use, the model could benefit from further conceptual development so as to be applicable to a wider variety of issues pertaining to capacity building and career development. Of particular importance, the original STHC model does not explicitly address various cultural issues related to gender, race, socioeconomic status, nationality, and disciplinary culture, all factors generally viewed as important to both scientific career trajectories and productivity. To address this issue, we propose a revised STHC model which includes a cultural dimension that overlays the human and social capital components of the original model. In particular, there is an advantage to incorporating a cultural dimension for the application of the STHC model to issues related to science and engineering careers for underrepresented groups and for understanding career barriers of scientists and graduate students.
Collaboration is central to modern scientific inquiry, and increasingly important to the professional experiences of academic scientists. While the effects of collaboration have been widely studied, much less is understood about the motivations to collaborate and collaboration dynamics that generate scientific outcomes. A particular interest of this study is to understand how collaboration experiences differ between women and men, and the attributions used to explain these differences. We use a multi-method study of university Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics faculty research collaborators. We employ 177 anonymous open-ended responses to a web-based survey, and 60 semi-structured interviews of academic scientists in US research universities. We find similarities and differences in collaborative activity between men and women. Open-ended qualitative textual analysis suggests that some of these differences are attributed to power dynamics – both general ones related to differences in organizational status, and in power dynamics related specifically to gender. In analysis of semi-structured interviews, we find that both status and gender were used as interpretive frames for collaborative behavior, with more emphasis placed on status than gender differences. Overall, the findings support that gender structures some part of the collaborative experience, but that status hierarchy exerts more clear effects.
This chapter
1) identifies the nature and extent of gender disparities in the participation, performance, and rewards of scientists, pointing to key issues that merit explanation, while taking a critical perspective on metrics of productivity and performance;
2) characterizes and appraises prevailing debates about explanations of gender disparities that contribute to understandings of gender and scientific careers; and
3) assesses existing policy interventions and promising models within US and European governments and organizations.
In doing this, we see that the issues and problems of gender and participation, performance, and rewards in scientific careers are complex, multi-faceted matters. So too are policy prospects for advancing gender equity and futures of scientific careers.
As the scientific enterprise has grown in size and diversity, we need empirical evidence on the research process to test and apply interventions that make it more efficient and its results more reliable. Meta-research is an evolving scientific discipline that aims to evaluate and improve research practices. It includes thematic areas of methods, reporting, reproducibility, evaluation, and incentives (how to do, report, verify, correct, and reward science). Much work is already done in this growing field, but efforts to-date are fragmented. We provide a map of ongoing efforts and discuss plans for connecting the multiple meta-research efforts across science worldwide.
Although women's representation in higher education nears parity with men at the undergraduate level, this representation diminishes as one ascends the academic ranks. Because gender gaps in the ‘elite’ activity of international research collaborations might contribute to the underrepresentation of women in the upper ranks, we ask if gender differences exist in participation in international collaborations and if family responsibilities constitute a glass fence – a gendered obstacle that keeps women from this engagement. Using an international data set, we find that women engage less in international collaborations than men, and that complex gendered patterns exist regarding the impacts of partner employment status and children. Both men and women benefit from having an academic partner, although men benefit more. Partner employment status matters more than children in certain family arrangements, suggesting that the former constitutes a glass fence, potentially impacting women's access to cutting-edge international knowledge production and elite academic positions
Use these ten principles to guide research evaluation, urge Diana Hicks, Paul Wouters and colleagues. were introduced, such as InCites (using the Web of Science) and SciVal (using Scopus), as well as software to analyse individual citation profiles using Google Scholar (Publish or Perish, released in 2007). In 2005, Jorge Hirsch, a physicist at the University of California, San Diego, proposed the h-index, popularizing citation counting for individual researchers. Interest in the journal impact factor grew steadily after 1995 (see 'Impact-factor obsession'). Lately, metrics related to social usage advice on, good practice and interpretation. Before 2000, there was the Science Citation Index on CD-ROM from the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), used by experts for specialist analyses. In 2002, Thomson Reuters launched an integrated web platform, making the Web of Science database widely accessible. Competing citation indices were created: Elsevier's Scopus (released in 2004) and Google Scholar (beta version released in 2004). Web-based tools to easily compare institutional research productivity and impact D
This study examines the determinants of exit from academic research which occurs when academic researchers move into positions in academe which concentrate on non-research activities such as teaching or administration, or when researchers leave academia and move into industry. Drawing on career data for 13,500 Japanese PhD graduates in hard sciences (all scientific fields except social sciences and humanities), we develop a set of econometric models to test the determinants of exit from a career in academic research. We find that academics' scientific productivity and academic network are negatively correlated with abandoning a university research career, and that female academics, and researchers in less prestigious universities, tend to exit academic research more easily. Individual and institutional network effects play a role mainly for senior researchers. The results indicate also that the determinants of exit are contingent on scientific field and career stage.
In this article, we analyse how variations in organisational conditions for research affect researchers' opportunities for changing individual-level or group-level research programmes. We contrast three innovations that were developed in universities and public research institutes in Germany and the Netherlands, which enables comparisons both between organisational settings and between properties of innovations. Comparing the development of three innovations in the two types of organisations enables the identification of links between patterns of authority sharing at these organisations and the opportunities to develop innovations. On this basis, the distribution of opportunities to change research practices among researchers in the two countries can be established.
Women are underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields, particularly at higher levels of organizations. This article investigates the impact of this underrepresentation on the processes of interpersonal collaboration in nanotechnology. Analyses are conducted to assess: (1) the comparative tie strength of women’s and men’s collaborations, (2) whether women and men gain equal access to scientific information through collaborators, (3) which tie characteristics are associated with access to information for women and men, and (4) whether women and men acquire equivalent amounts of information by strengthening ties. Our results show that the overall tie strength is less for women’s collaborations and that women acquire less strategic information through collaborators. Women and men rely on different tie characteristics in accessing information, but are equally effective in acquiring additional information resources by strengthening ties. This article demonstrates that the
The academic career in Europe used to be much more unstructured and much less
competitive than today. Currently, as reflected in interviews carried out throughout Europe, “each step in a career is competitive“, from doctoral and postdoctoral to junior academic and senior academic positions. There are significant variations across the European countries studied regarding the level of competition, often different in different places occupied in the academic hierarchy. But increasing
competition has come to the academic profession and is bound to stay: the competition for part-time and full-time academic positions, for research grants and research funding, and tokens of academic prestige. The academic progression today has to be made systematically, in increasingly
clearly defined timeframes, and the academic career seems to be sliced into comparable time periods across European systems. Usually, the timeframes are doctoral studies, employment in postdoctoral and junior positions, employment in lower-level senior positions and, finally, in higher-level senior positions (such as
traditional chair holding and/or full professorships), and all career steps have to be reached within a certain time period.
In many high-technology fields, large firms have become increasingly keen to engage with the open knowledge networks of university scientists in order to keep at the cutting edge of scientific development. This paper examines how close collaborative relationships between firms and universities have succeeded by constructing network career models between the two sets of organisations. It focuses on a growing category of research scientists referred to as 'linked scientists'. These people engage in the practices of both science and business, and develop knowledge networks and career patterns that straddle the two sectors. The analysis highlights the emergence of a hybrid organisational space structured around the linked mobility of people. The notion of an 'overlapping internal labour market' gives insight into our understanding of the interdependent relationship between flexible projects and more enduring career arrangements that support knowledge governance across organisational boundaries.
Background:
The education and training of early career biomedical translational researchers often involves formal mentoring by more experienced colleagues.
Purposes:
This study investigated the nature of these mentoring relationships from the perspective of mentees. The objective was to understand the challenges and issues encountered by mentees in forming and maintaining productive mentoring relationships.
Methods:
Three focus groups (n=14) were conducted with early career researchers who had mentored career development awards. Thematic analysis identified, categorized, and illustrated the challenges and issues reported by mentees.
Results:
The range of mentee challenges was reflected in five major categories: (a) network--finding appropriate mentors to meet various needs; (b) access--structuring schedules and opportunities to receive mentoring; (c) expectations--negotiating the mechanics of the mentoring relationship and its purpose; (d) alignment--managing mentor-mentee mismatches regarding interests, priorities, and goals; and (e) skills and supports--developing the institutional supports to be successful.
Conclusions:
Mentoring relationships created for academic training and career development contend with tasks common to many other relationships, namely, recognizing compatibility, finding time, establishing patterns, agreeing to goals, and achieving aims. Identifying challenges faced by mentees can facilitate the development of appropriate trainings and supports to foster mentoring relationships in academic and career settings.
This paper derives from our joint interest in understanding how scientific mobility affects developing countries. Many authors have addressed the topic previously, both from an economic and from a sociological perspective. However, recent literature evinces dissatisfaction with both analytical frameworks and the framing of public policies addressing the brain drain problematic. This paper is a contribution to understanding the historical and theoretical foundations of the “brain drain” debate. We aim to improve conceptual clarity regarding the itinerancy of human beings and the mobilization of human capital. We develop a critical review of the economics of the brain drain, highlighting the work of some key early thinkers and pointing out the way in which subsequent work has taken up selected aspects of their approaches leaving other challenges aside. We then consider the diaspora networks literature, which is characterized as taking a “connectionist” approach to the brain drain. We identify two fundamental problems: the sidelining of complementarity and context dependency as basic properties of human capital; and a failure to adequately disentangle the concepts of human resources for science and technology (HRST) and human capital in academic and policy discourse about the brain drain.
It is often assumed that academically trained scientists have a strong taste for science and are willing to “pay” for the ability to openly disclose their research results. However, little is known regarding how scientists considering jobs in industrial R&D make trade-offs between positions that allow publishing on the one hand and positions that do not allow publishing but offer higher pay on the other. Using data on over 1900 science and engineering PhD candidates about to enter the job market, we find that while some are unwilling to give up publishing at virtually any price, over one third of those most likely to seek positions in industrial research are willing to forego publishing for free. We develop a simple model of the “price” scientists assign to publishing in firms and explore potential sources of heterogeneity empirically. We find that the price of publishing increases with individuals’ preferences for various benefits from publishing such as peer recognition and contributing to society, but it decreases with their preference for money. Scientists who believe themselves to be of high ability and who train at top tier institutions have a higher price of publishing. Yet, they are more expensive to hire (not less) even if publishing is allowed. We discuss implications for research on the economics of science and on compensating differentials, for managers seeking to attract and retain academically trained personnel, and for firms considering their participation in open science.
Cassidy R. Sugimoto and colleagues present a bibliometric analysis confirming that gender imbalances persist in research output worldwide.
Migrant scientists outperform domestic scientists. The result persists after instrumenting migration for reasons of work or study with migration in childhood to minimize the effect of selection. The results are consistent with theories of knowledge recombination and specialty matching.
In the article we analyse the structuring of time among academic employees in Iceland, how they organize and reconcile their work and family life and whether gender is a defining factor in this context. Our analysis shows clear gender differences in time use. Although flexible working hours help academic parents to organize their working day and fulfil the ever-changing needs of family members, the women, rather than men interviewed, seem to be stuck with the responsibility of domestic and caring issues because of this very same flexibility. It seems to remove, for more women than for men, the possibility of going home early or not being on call. The flexibility and the gendered time use seem thus to reproduce traditional power relations between women and men and the gender segregated division in the homes.
Understanding how institutional incentives and mechanisms for assigning recognition shape access to a permanent job is important. This study, based on data from questionnaire survey responses and publications of 1,257 university science, biomedical and engineering faculty in Spain, attempts to understand the timing of getting a permanent position and the relevant factors that account for this transition, in the context of dilemmas between mobility and permanence faced by organizations. Using event history analysis, the paper looks at the time to promotion and the effects of some relevant covariates associated to academic performance, social embeddedness and mobility. We find that research productivity contributes to career acceleration, but that other variables are also significantly associated to a faster transition. Factors associated to the social elements of academic life also play a role in reducing the time from PhD graduation to tenure. However, mobility significantly increases the duration of the non-tenure stage. In contrast with previous findings, the role of sex is minor. The variations in the length of time to promotion across different scientific domains is confirmed, with faster career advancement for those in the Engineering and Technological Sciences compared with academics in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences. Results show clear effects of seniority, and rewards to loyalty, in addition to some measurements of performance and quality of the university granting the PhD, as key elements speeding up career advancement. Findings suggest the existence of a system based on granting early permanent jobs to those that combine social embeddedness and team integration with some good credentials regarding past and potential future performance, rather than high levels of mobility.
This is the opening article in a Human Relations special issue on ‘Interdisciplinary approaches to contemporary career studies’. After introducing a story of an ‘exceptional — but real’ career, we argue for an urgent shift toward greater interdisciplinary inquiry. We reflect on the story to describe differences in the way each of psychology, sociology, social psychology, and economics views the concept of career. We turn to explore what career researchers, representing each of the above social sciences, might not see on their own. In contrast, we highlight how social scientists can move toward a) appreciating the limitations of our separate approaches, b) introducing more appropriate research methods, c) maintaining a wider cross-disciplinary conversation, and d) better serving the client — the person — in our future research. We continue with a preview of the remaining five articles in this special issue, and propose that these can serve as stimuli for a wider conversation.
A powerful and internationally competitive research base, essential to the present and future vitality of Europe, depends fundamentally on a strong cohort of highly creative researchers, and therefore on Europe's capacity to attract some of the best minds in each generation, not only from Europe, but also from the global pool of talent. The institutions in which research is done must respond to four vital contemporary imperatives: -the need for "critical diversity" as well as critical mass, recognising that many of the most powerful ideas arise from unexpected areas of study; that many major challenges facing the contemporary world require systemic thinking that draws on a great variety of disciplines, and that researchers must be adept in working in such a setting; -that research in many domains is a global enterprise and must be able to engage globally; -that national interests not only require collaboration but competitiveness by international standards. The uniqueness amongst human institutions of comprehensive research-intensive universities, because of the breadth of knowledge they encompass, makes them ideal locations for the development of the researchers that society needs. They play the crucial role of educating and training Europe's researchers in their early careers, and therefore carry a heavy responsibility to offer attractive and stimulating careers and a productive setting for research. They must play a central role in developing the European Research Area if this is to become a powerful agent in developing Europe's research capacity. Although research careers can rarely compete with the salaries of the private sector it is important that they are seen to offer unique opportunities for well-supported, creative freedom and personal satisfaction. The key objectives of policy for research careers must be: to attract highly talented graduates from the international pool of talent; to support realisation of a researcher's potential for creativity; and to maximize benefit to knowledge, learning and society. To do this, we must maximize the potential for high achievement and provide an attractive career framework. Realising the potential for high achievement depends upon: -a research environment with a wide variety of researchers working on cognate topics, strong links with other disciplines in a cross-disciplinary setting, good international connections, cross-fertilisation of ideas from external researchers, and access to appropriate facilities. -independence and responsibility at an early stage of a research career. An attractive and efficient research career structure requires: -well-designed posts that are adapted both to research needs and career prospects of researchers;-well- structured career perspectives that clearly indicate avenues for progression including posts outside academia; -strong funding and facilitating processes that permit competitive salaries to be offered; -career development support; -advice and support for diverse career pathways; -shared responsibility for research careers between all key stakeholders, comprising universities, governments and those from public and private sector who fund research. We identify five principal functional types of research post that we believe exist amongst those researchers not holding a full-time academic position: -Personal research fellowships, which we strongly advocate should be extended to five years or more; -Research associates employed through research grants; -Enterprise fellowships that offer holders support in developing commercial applications from their research; -Research assistants employed through highly specific research contracts; -Research assistants/high-level technical officers. The principles described in the previous paragraph should be applied in different ways to all these functional types. There are considerable differences between research careers in different European countries. A four-stage model of research careers which permits comparison between different European systems is presented, together with career maps that illustrate the patterns of progression between these stages across Europe. They are designed for researchers in planning their futures. The patterns reflect historical and cultural differences and must be understood before any attempts are made to unify elements of career structure across Europe.
We provide an alternative model for evaluating science and technology projects and programs. Our approach, a "scientific and technical human capital" (S&T human capital) model, gives less attention to the discrete products and immediate outcomes from scientific projects and programs ‐ the usual focus of evaluations ‐ and more attention to scientists' career trajectories and their sustained ability to contribute and enhance their capabilities. S&T human capital encompasses not only the individual human capital endowments but also researchers' tacit knowledge, craft knowledge, and know‐how. S&T human capital further includes the social capital that scientists continually draw upon in creating knowledge ‐ for knowledge creation is neither a solitary nor singular event. In sum, it is this expanded notion of human capital when paired with a productive social capital network that enables researchers to create and transform knowledge and ideas in ways that would not be possible without these resources. We review literature contributing to an S&T human capital model and consider some of the practical data and measurement issues entailed in implementing such an approach.
Scientific careers are theoretically and practically important because they link individuals with institutions as well as social structures with knowledge production. These mediating functions have to date not been systematically dealt with. In this article, a neoinstitutionalist framework for the analysis of careers in science is developed. Careers in science are treated as products of overlapping institutions belonging to the different social contexts in which scientists act simultaneously. These contexts (their specialty, society and employment organisation) yield specific institutions that shape different work roles, which can be analytically distinguished. With regard to a specialty's knowledge production, four different career stages (apprentice, colleague, mentor and sponsor) can be distinguished on the basis of dominant work roles. Society's institutions (e.g., language, education and employment system) structure the international specialties, which can be said to consist of national subsets. Organisations provide work roles that integrate knowledge production into the employment system. Job sequences become institutionalised as career lines that structure international internal labour markets. While there is agreement in the literature that academic organisations do not provide internal labour markets, so far it has been neglected that specialties have these properties. The stability of these international internal labour markets currently seems to be endangered because both organisations and specialties can only balance the conflicting demands for fixed‐term contracts and permanent positions when they grow. As a conclusion of the theoretical discussion, a research program is outlined.
Most researchers acknowledge an intrinsic hierarchy in the scholarly journals (“journal rank”) that they submit their work to, and adjust not only their submission but also their reading strategies accordingly. On the other hand, much has been written about the negative effects of institutionalizing journal rank as an impact measure. So far, contributions to the debate concerning the limitations of journal rank as a scientific impact assessment tool have either lacked data, or relied on only a few studies. In this review, we present the most recent and pertinent data on the consequences of our current scholarly communication system with respect to various measures of scientific quality (such as utility/citations, methodological soundness, expert ratings or retractions). These data corroborate previous hypotheses: using journal rank as an assessment tool is bad scientific practice. Moreover, the data lead us to argue that any journal rank (not only the currently-favored Impact Factor) would have this negative impact. Therefore, we suggest that abandoning journals altogether, in favor of a library-based scholarly communication system, will ultimately be necessary. This new system will use modern information technology to vastly improve the filter, sort and discovery functions of the current journal system.
Including contributions from leading scholars at Harvard Business School, Yale, and MIT's Sloan School of Management, this book explores the ways that careers have changed for workers as their firms reorganize to meet global competition. As firms re-engineer, downsize, enter into strategic alliances with other firms, and find other ways to reduce costs, they frequently lay off workers. Job security has been replaced by insecurity and workers have been forced to take charge of their own career development in ways they have never done before. The contributors to the book analyse the implications for these workers, who now have "boundary less careers". While many find the challenge rewarding as they find new opportunities for growth, others are finding it difficult to adapt to new jobs in new locations. The book looks at policy issues that can provide safety nets for those who are not able to find a place in the new world of boundary less careers.
Although organisational mobility has become a crucial part of a researcher’s early career phase, its causes and functions in the early career are not yet sufficiently explained. In particular, the field-specific nature of patterns of national and international mobility has been noted but not systematically analysed. Based on case studies and CV data of German early career researchers in plant biology, experimental AMO physics and early modern history we explain differences in mobility patterns by the embeddedness of career decisions in field-specific research practices. In those fields, early career researchers have to develop their first individual research programmes, and enact scripts for their cognitive and organisational careers in order to arrive at such programmes.
Enacting the scripts involves utilising organisational positions for specific purposes, which informs the selection of positions and thus shapes patterns of mobility.
In this chapter we review the literature on the analysis of researcher mobility and productivity highlighting recent changes in the research system - internationalization, inter-sector mobility and collaboration and career diversification which make researcher mobility more relevant for the dynamics of knowledge creation and dissemination. Our review reveals that to date we still know little about the consequences and motivations of increased mobility for individual researchers. We contribute by presenting a typology of researcher mobility, and considering the relevance of multiple mobility events throughout a researcher career. Finally, we review the modeling problems related to analyzing the effect of mobility on academic performance at the individual level, and suggest various solutions.
Using a data set of 370 bioscience professors in Japan, this chapter investigates the effect of PhD training, early career job transition, and international mobility on a professor's probability of both placement at a highly ranked institution and promotion. We found that the prestige of the PhD institution is the best predictor for initial placement and that inbreeding is more common at prestigious institutions. Mobility results in promotion in lower-ranked universities, indicating a strategic decision to move down for promotional benefits. International research visits have a positive effect on promotion but do not affect access to prestigious institutions. Postdoctoral stays have no effect. We also found that merit does not determine promotion duration of early career academics or initial placement but that it does predict promotion to full professor. It also affects the propensity to be placed in a highly ranked university in mid-to late-career stages.
The governance of the public sciences has profoundly changed since the Second World War, especially with regard to funding structures, the autonomy, and accountability of public research organizations and universities, and the extent to which research is steered towards societal usefulness. Going beyond previous analyses of these changes in science studies, science policy, and higher education studies, this book presents and applies a novel approach that provides an integrated assessment of changes in public science systems and their impact on scientific innovation. Its basic assumptions are (i) that all changes in public science systems (PSS) affect authority relations - the interests and action capabilities of authoritative agencies in science - and (ii) that the authority relations concerning the selection of goals and approaches in research as well as the integration of research results are the channel through which changes in PSS affect the production of scientific knowledge and particularly scientific innovation. This focus on authority relations as the key interface integrating changes in governance and translating them into changes in the production of scientific knowledge is an important innovation because the effects of governance at the performance level of the science system have been largely neglected by other approaches.
Having benefitted from highly specialised research training, doctoral holders stand in a position to drive forward advances in science, technology and knowledge about society. Unfortunately, evidence on their careers is limited and sparse, owing, for example, to the fact that standard statistical sources are typically far too small to produce statistically robust results for this population. With a view to better understanding the labour market, career path and mobility of doctorate holders, the OECD, in coordination with the UNESCO Institute for Statistics and Eurostat, launched in 2004 a specific project on the Careers of Doctorate Holders (CDH). This paper provides an overview of the key statistical and analytical findings that draw on data from the second international CDH data collection conducted in 2010. It analyses the labour market and employment patterns of doctorate holders. Then, it looks at some important specificities of the doctoral job market, such as employment in research and patterns of job-to-job and international mobility. The study reveals a sustained labour market premium of doctorate holders relative to other highly qualified individuals. Women and younger doctoral graduates, however, fare relatively worse in terms of employment rates. While temporary positions are increasingly common in academics, they are less so in business. Natural scientists and engineers are more likely to be engaged in research, while social scientists find more opportunities in non-research occupations. Earnings are typically higher in the business sector than in other sectors, but there are exceptions. Job mobility patterns differ markedly across countries, with mobility being more frequent among doctorates not working in research. Oftentimes mobility from the business sector to the higher education sector is higher than the other way around. International mobility has kept increasing over the decade, although less common than it might be assumed for researchers. A wide range of monetary and non-pecuniary factors contribute to explaining the reported attractiveness of research careers. Satisfaction levels on aspects other than pay are particularly high for individuals working in research. Additional micro data work provide a clearer understanding on the career advancement of doctoral graduates in research and further information on job-to-job and international mobility patterns according to age, sex, sector of employment, field of science, type of contract as well as involvement in collaboration and networking activities.
Postdoctoral scholars may be economic complements or substitutes for faculty, doctoral research assistants and capital in the production of university life science research. Using data on 120 US universities, we present two cross-sectional (1993 and 2006) descriptive econometric models. Results suggest that postdocs serve primarily as complements to other labour inputs and capital. These relationships are potentially a source of concern to science policy makers because misperception and misallocation of complementary inputs is more costly than that of substitute inputs and may result in fragile and unstable systems. This instability is costly for individuals in the scientific workforce and poses a threat to the continued productivity and innovation of academic research.
We explore factors that lead students and postdoctoral scholars who train outside their native country to come to the United States rather than go to a third country for study. We use data collected by the authors in 2011 as part of the GlobSci project of research-active scientists working in 16 countries. Our research suggests that public policy plays an important role in attracting the foreign born to study in a country and that the US is a magnet for foreign students and postdocs precisely because the US has excelled in creating a strong educational and research environment. We further find that students who come to the US score factors that are proxies for the research environment higher than students who go to most other countries for training.
Cooperative research centres (CRCs) increasingly foster Triple Helix (industry–university–government) collaboration and represent significant vehicles for cooperation across sectors, the promotion of knowledge and technology transfer and ultimately the acceleration of innovation.
A growing social science literature on CRCs focuses on their management and best practices, mainly through success stories and rarely by describing and analysing CRC failures. The literature on CRCs can benefit by learning from failures, as has been seen in other areas of social science. Here
the authors present four mini-cases of CRC failures – centres that were successfully launched but later declined and closed – and, in contrast, one mini-case of a success story. The analysis identifies: (a) likely contributing factors in the failures, mainly environmental influences
and mismanagement of centre transitions; (b) themes in the failures, notably a tendency for problems in one area to magnify the impact of problems in other areas; and (c) learning points for CRCs concerning leadership and succession. The implications for Triple Helix organizations are discussed.
The conventional wisdom regarding the source of progress in medical practice highlights the role of basic scientific research into the nature of disease pathologies. This perspective neglects the important role of two other sources of progress in medicine. One is the advance of technologies that have enabled the development of new modalities of treatment and diagnosis. The other is learning in clinical practice. In many cases the advance of treatment has involved the interaction of all three of these pathways to progress.
We examine the survival of young scientists in academe. The propensity to leave follows an inverse u-shape. Publishing increases and patenting decreases the chance of survival. Scientists with strong preferences for business are less likely to stay in academe.
This paper provides an answer to the puzzle of why, in a system where collaboration is increasingly important and life‐cycle models provide a modest explanation of observable outcomes, the career stage of the individual remains an important concept. We argue that three factors are key to the explanation of this paradox. First, the reward structure in science, particularly in academe, places great emphasis on the attainment of benchmarks in the context of a career. Second, the funding mechanism by which university laboratories have traditionally been supported in the US places great emphasis on the individual and often is targeted to the career stage of the individual. Third, the funding regime which has evolved in the US encourages the use of doctoral students and post doctoral students as researchers in the laboratories. This provides for a system in which a fugue of life cycles plays out in the laboratory and a means by which networks are put in place as early career scientists leave the nest and go about establishing their own laboratories or move to the laboratories of others.
Academic careers in Germany have been under debate for a while. We conduct a survey among postdocs in Germany, to analyze the perceptions and attitudes of postdocs regarding their research incentives, their working conditions, and their career prospects. We conceptualize the career prospects of a postdoc in a life-cycle perspective of transitions from academic training to academic or non-academic jobs. Only about half of the postdocs sees strong incentives for academic research, but there is quite a strong confidence to succeed in an academic career. Furthermore, postdocs who attended a PhD program show better career prospects and higher research incentives compared to others. Academic career prospects and motivation are strongest for assistant professors. Apart from this small group, however, postdocs report only a small impact of the university reforms of the last decade. Female postdocs show significantly higher research incentives but otherwise we find little gender differences. Finally, good prospects in non-academic jobs are not associated with a reduction in the motivation for research.